A Colossal Wreck (77 page)

Next week I shall report on the decisions of the Prosecutor on the accused.

From: Thomas Naylor

“Have a nice one …”

Nice what? Cheese, mushroom, and pepperoni pizza? Hearty dump? Damn good f…? Well, you know. Probably the first—since most of those robotic sales types uttering that apogee of inanity have cheesy smiles on their faces and are programmed to masticate only sound-bite-sized slices.

From: N. Haiduck

I wonder if there is room on the tumbril cart for on (or off) the table? I seem to remember Obama saying that prosecuting Bush and Cheney were off the table. I’m sure I’ve seen it a number of times in the last few years.

From: Stuart Newman

… with “on the ground,” notwithstanding all the insights garnered there by guests of The PBS NewsHour and Charlie Rose.

Here,
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/jan-june12/nevada_02-03.html
, at 3:02, Judy Woodruff asks a reporter what he has learned on the ground about Mitt Romney’s popularity among Nevada voters, and the reporter responds in kind (3:13), despite the fact that he is 100 feet above a fake cityscape of Las Vegas.

From: Bruce Anderson

Not much in circulation yet but spotted twice now in edu-prose: “… a search firm dedicated to SURFACING (my emphasis) appropriate candidates for school district leadership positions.” I also nominate “appropriate” as now applied to everything from mass murder to bad table manners.

From: Ed Szewczyk

I have some nominations for the tumbrils: 1. “Robust,” as in robust interrogation techniques, or robust Article II powers. Seems always to be used as a euphemism for the unconstitutional and/or illegal abuse of something …

From: Troy Nichols

Another proposition, let’s just permanently dispose of an entire class of obnoxious business speech: the made-up business gerund (examples: “decisioning,” “bootstrapping,” “costing,” “tumbrilling?” New ones are being invented every day). These clunky mutations are often close to meaningless, and the rest of the world surely laughs when they hear us talking like that. At present these words are highly concentrated in corporate memos and various official statements, but they’ll soon leak into the public discourse if left unchecked. You see it every once in a while already. Proliferation is certain. Let’s preempt this danger and send them all to the tumbrils now. If there’s any doubt about a certain word, say it in its infinitive form (“to decision,” “to cost”). If it sounds ridiculous, off it goes …

February 17

Few spectacles have been more surreal than that of senior US officials—starting with the President, the Secretary of State and the US ambassador to the UN—solemnly lecturing Assad and his beleaguered Syrian government on the need to accommodate rebel forces whose GCC sponsors are intent on slaughtering the ruling Alawite minority or driving them into the sea.

At one grimly hilarious moment last Friday, these worthy sermons were buttressed by a message from Ayman al-Zawahiri, the head of al-Qaida, therefore presumably the number one target on President Obama’s hit list, similarly praising the “Lions of Syria” for rising up against the Assad regime. Al-Qaida and the White House in sync!

March 7

Suddenly the right has gone truly crazy. It must be sunspots. We’re three years into sunspot cycle number twenty-four and it crests in activity with fifty-nine sunspots in early 2013, the weakest sunspot cycle in a hundred years, therefore not much help in the earth’s current cooling phase, during which—contrary to warmist doctrine—CO
₂
levels have been rising. Overall there has been a fairly steady warming trend of 0.5°C per century since 1680, which is when that notorious playboy Charles II of England began racing his Ferrari at Silverstone.

If you’re into sunspot theory, increased negative ionization during sunspot maximum periods increases human excitability.

The sunspot-sodden American right—in this instance the male right—is imploding under the sheer pressure of its repressions, always nearer the surface than in the more decorous psychic plumbing of the liberal legions. It feels like we’re back in 1960 when the pill first came on line and predictions of moral collapse were selling by the gross at every convenience store.

March 23

“In the twenty-first century, the best anti-poverty program around is a first-class education,” President Obama famously declared in his 2010 State of the Union Address, just as millions of high schoolers across the nation were embarking on the annual ritual of picking their preferred colleges and preparing the grand tour of the prospects, with parents in tow, gazing ashen faced at the prospective fees.

The image is of the toiling students springing from lecture room to well-paying jobs demanding advanced skills in all the arts that can make America great again—out-thinking, out-knowing the Chinese, Japanese, Indians, South Koreans, and Germans in the cutting edge, cut-throat high-tech economies of tomorrow.

Start with the raw material in this epic knowledge battle. As a dose of cold water over all this high-minded talk it’s worth looking at Josipa Roksa and Richard Arum’s recently published
Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses
. The two profs followed
more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-nine universities, selected to represent the range of America’s 2,000-plus four-year college institutions. As summarized by Steven Kent in
Daily Finance:

Among the authors’ findings: 32 percent of the students whom they followed in an average semester did not take any courses that assigned more than 40 pages of reading per week. Half did not take any courses in which more than 20 pages of writing were assigned throughout the entire term. Furthermore, 35 percent of the students sampled spent five hours or less a week studying alone.

Typical students spent about 16 percent of their time on academic pursuits, and were “academically engaged,” write the authors, less than 30 hours a week. After two years in college, 45 percent of students showed no significant gains in learning; after four years, 36 percent showed little change. And the students who did show improvement only logged very modest gains. Students spent 50 percent less time studying compared with students a few decades ago.

Students who majored in traditional liberal arts fields like philosophy, history and English showed “significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study.” But of course these are the courses and instructors being ruthlessly pruned back.

One of the study’s authors, Richard Arum, says college governing boards, shoveling out colossal sums to their presidents, athletic coaches and senior administrative staff, demand that the focus be “student retention,” also known as trying very hard not to kick anyone out for not doing any measurable work. As Arum put it to
Money College
, “Students are much more likely to drop out of school when they are not socially engaged, and colleges and universities increasingly view students as consumers and clients. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that all students want to be exposed to a rigorous academic program.”

The US government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that in 2010 only 20 percent of jobs required a bachelor’s degree, whereas 26 percent of jobs did not even require a high-school diploma, and another 43 percent required only a high-school diploma or equivalent.

Please note that the latter 69 percent were therefore free of the one debt in America that’s even more certain than taxes—a student loan. At least if you’re provably broke the IRS will countenance an “offer in compromise.” In fact they recently made the process slightly easier.
No such luck with student loans. The banks are in your pocket till the last dime of loan plus interest has been extorted.

Now for the next dose of cold water. The BLS reckons that by 2020 the overwhelming majority of jobs will still require only a high-school diploma or less and that nearly three quarters of “job openings due to growth and replacement needs” over the next ten years will pay a median wage of less than $35,000 a year, with nearly 30 percent paying a median of about $20,000 a year (in 2010 dollars).

As Jack Metzgar, emeritus professor of humanities at Roosevelt University, correctly remarks, “Put these two sets of numbers together, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Americans are over educated for the jobs that we have and are going to have. It’s hard to imagine why anybody would call us ‘a knowledge economy.’ ” In other words, millions of Americans are over-educated, servicing endless debt to the banks and boosting the bottom lines of Red Bull and the breweries.

The snobbery, as Metzgar points out, stems from the fact that America’s endless, mostly arid debates about education are conducted by the roughly one-third who are college-educated and have okay jobs and a decent income. The “knowledge economy” in the US now needs more than six million people with master’s or doctoral degrees, with another 1.3 million needed by 2020. But this will still be less than 5 percent of the overall economy.

Even if we expand the definition to include jobs requiring any education beyond high school, the “knowledge economy”—now and a decade from now—will still represent less than one-third of all available jobs. This is a lot of jobs, about forty-four million now, and if you work and live in this one-third, especially in its upper reaches, more education can seem like the answer to everything. Indeed, according to the BLS, having a bachelor’s degree should yield a person nearly $30,000 a year more in wages than a high-school graduate. But most of the American economy is not like this.

The BLS’s three largest occupational categories by themselves accounted for more than one-third of the workforce in 2010 (forty-nine million jobs), and they will make an outsized contribution to the new jobs projected for 2020. They are: office and administrative
support occupations (median wage of $30,710); sales and related occupations ($24,370); food preparation and serving occupations ($18,770). Other occupations projected to provide the largest number of new jobs in the next decade include childcare workers ($19,300), personal care aides ($19,640), home health aides ($20,560), janitors and cleaners ($22,210), teacher assistants ($23,220), non-construction laborers ($23,460), security guards ($23,920), and construction laborers ($29,280).

So what is the best anti-poverty program? Higher wages for the jobs that are out there, currently yielding impossibly low annual incomes. The current American minimum wage ranges between $7.25 and $8.67 per hour. From time to time senior executives of Walmart call for a rise in the minimum wage since, in the words of one former CEO, Lee Scott, “our customers simply don’t have the money to buy basic necessities between pay checks.” The minimum wage in Ontario, Canada, is currently well over $10 per hour, while in France it now stands at nearly $13. Australia recently raised its minimum wage to over $16 per hour, and nonetheless has an unemployment rate of just 5 percent.

March 23

From: Michael Dawson, Portland, OR

In Harm’s Way: This one was apparently used by our friend Staff Sgt. Robert Bales in a 2009 Pentagon-published discourse on how to distinguish “good guys” from “bad guys”: “We discriminated between the bad guys and the noncombatants, and then afterward we ended up helping the people that three or four hours before were trying to kill us. I think that’s the real difference between being an American as opposed to being a bad guy, someone who puts his family in harm’s way like that.”

In harm’s way. It dehumanizes and dehistoricizes all enemies. It flatters the speaker as somebody who chooses to stop Evil, presumably also suggesting the notion that, once one gains that status, one has the right to go shoot up a village.

April 5

I’d say the chances of George Zimmerman spending time behind bars for killing Trayvon Martin are about the same as Sgt. Robert Bales doing time for killing those sixteen Afghan villagers the night of March 11. Zero.

Like most things that happen in America these days, the Trayvon Martin case is turning into yet another hearse trundling the Republican Party to its doom in November.

Zimmerman stakes his defense on Chapter 776.013 of the Florida criminal statute on home protection and the use of deadly force. Paragraph 3 states, “A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.” This is what’s colloquially known as the Stand Your Ground Law.

Outrage about the case built across the first two weeks of March. By the third week it was a national scandal. Black columnists described how they warn their sons not to run in any crisis situation, always be polite to the cops no matter how provoked. The Rev. Al Sharpton covers the case full volume on MSNBC. The usual litter of deadly cop shootings of blacks are exhumed from recent Florida police records. Protest demonstrations are held in Sanford.

There are the obvious questions. If Martin had wrestled the gun away from Zimmerman and shot him, would he have been allowed to walk away free? No, Sir. Political pressure forces the appointment of Special Prosecutor Angela Corey, to determine whether to charge Zimmerman. If she does so, it will probably be for second-degree manslaughter.

President Obama speaks on March 23 about the killing of Trayvon, saying, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon … I think [Trayvon’s parents] are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and we are going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.”